YOU CAN’T GET DR PEPPER?!?!?!?

Oh no! How can that be? Dude, send me some contact info, and I’ll send you some!!!

Do you want the most common, made with corn syrup, or do you prefer the stuff made wth cane sugar (aka. “Dublin Dr. Pepper.”).

Let me know,

Tim

Here’s the thing. The trap I (and many around me) fall into is thinking for one second that the Kingdom of Heaven is rational and organizational. It isn’t. It’s a remnant. God chooses whom He will, and it’s not often the obvious choices. You might can put together a “dream church planting team” out of people you personally know, but the concept isn’t scalable. What works for you won’t work for the next guy. There is no blueprint for it, as much we all sometimes seem to want one.

A text I’ve been working through is Romans 14. I read it first to inform my own beliefs about alcohol and other “matters of conscience,” but I’ve since extended it to other matters of faith and practice. My concept of calling is being stretched to fit other people’s callings, which often look very different from mine. And I can easily judge how well I think they’re living up to the calling they claim, if I can only avoid thinking about how well I live up to the calling I claim. Especially since every stop along my faith/service journey has been a growing experience for me, and knowing I’m still learning even now (i.e. I haven’t yet learned whatever God is trying to knock through my thick skull right now), who am I to criticize others for not having “gotten it right” yet?

point deux.
by all wisdom and knowledge, we ought to be working to a point where NONE of us should be here. but the fact remains that the work is increasing, not decreasing, the enemy seems to be growing stronger in some areas while abandoning others. it’s push-pull and tarry-a-while, while the debate of “does blogging reduce your effective time going door to door and ‘witnessing’ to people” rages back in the states.

so keep the posts coming. i’d love to read about the “belong here’s”, but i kinda think that there is another category that needs to be covered as well … “the wannabes”.

then i read about the lifers and again i said, “preach it brother.” what is it with the slackers? in the middle of my own personal, mental raving, i got convicted. while pointing the finger at others, i realized that there is a bit of the professional and the lifer in me. there are times when i want to hide behind administrative details because i get sick of chasing after people who seem to careless about god. there are days when i don’t know what to do. it is hard here. sometimes i don’t know what to try, who to call, what to say. on those days, i order a pizza, rent a movie and pretend that i am still in the states. i become a lifer for a day.

i guess i confess that to say that i never want to fall into the trap of being so critical of others that i forget to evaluate myself. pride is deceitful. i don’t want to become what i preach against.

I’ll have you know that the time I spend writing and posting here isn’t taken from “winning people to Christ” time, but from my scheduled “personal hygiene” time. I haven’t had a bath in weeks, but my blog sure is getting lots of hits!

Perhaps someone can help me here. How can I ask questions and make people think (the reason for my blog) without sounding like a complainer?

Also, I don’t spend any time sitting around dreaming up what to blog about. I post about things that I come across in my everyday life and ministry. Ideas like “Maybe not everyone belongs on the mission field” and “The Dangers of Modernism” aren’t something you hear about very often, so I write about them. Sometimes I’m processing these sorts of ideas. Other times I’m venting my frustrations. Usually, what you read here are pages out of my personal journal.

These are the concepts I wrestle with every day. I’m not trying to expose anything or blow any whistles. I’m not looking for a scandal. I try not to concern myself with the politics of the SBC, but instead to give you an idea of what life is like for me apart form the minutiae of what I ate for breakfast that day.

My recent string of posts was not written as an attack on the IMB or as a judgement on any individual. It was written (originally as one long, rambling note) as I thought through some of my current team issues and as I dreamed about putting together my “dream” church planting team. As an upbeat ending, I was planning on posting “Who Should Be Here” or something like that. (Okay, so my post titles do take hours upons hours to come up with.)

I appreciate all of the comments, even the ones that are contrary and slightly argumentative. Not so much the mean ones, though…

It is a hard but necessary job to point out what is wrong with an organization. I agree somewhat with the anonymous poster just above, that you have to be careful not to let this whistle-blowing work take over too much of your life. But I won’t go as far as he does, because I don’t think blogging and faithfully witnessing to the lost are mutually exclusive, not an either-or proposition.

Sorry I haven’t been by for a while. I’ve been too busy listening to Dr. Condoleezza Rice hold a political rally at the SBC and all the other nonsense that went on in Greensboro.

Love in Christ,

Jeff